02/01/2026
There’s a lot happening in our country, and many people will be asked to serve on juries to decide the fate of others.
Jury duty is a fundamental civic obligation. But for most people, serving on a jury means time away from work—and we all know time is money. Low juror pay functions like a strainer in our courts, filtering out those who cannot afford to serve on cases likely to last more than a day. Ironically, the cases that most need jurors with diverse life experience and perspectives are often the very ones many people cannot afford to sit through.
Often, jurors are compensated at just 25 dollars per day. For salaried workers, that loss may be absorbed. For hourly workers, contractors, caregivers, and those without paid leave, it often cannot. With such a low stipend, many jurors lose at least 33 dollars every single day of service and often far more. That loss shows up as missed wages, strained schedules, delayed bills, and difficult tradeoffs that add up with each additional day in court.
Some defend low juror pay as civic duty, arguing that service should require sacrifice. In practice, it acts as an economic filter, quietly excluding those who cannot afford the loss. When civic responsibility ignores financial reality, participation becomes selective. The result is not a true jury of peers, but a jury shaped by who can afford to serve and by those who feel pressure for everything to end quickly just to stop the financial drain.
25 × 14 × number of trial days. That’s the design. When jurors are strained by low pay, the courtroom becomes a pressure cooker, with everything competing against the ticking clock of a juror’s bank account.
A system that has lasted this long is designed to strain some out. Don’t let it. If you have the good fortune to survive the rigorous strainer that comes with jury selection, stay and serve. One day, it might be someone you care about sitting next to a defense attorney, hoping for an open-minded juror just like you.
